English is a Pain in the Arstermeister

…let’s call it Americanish…

I have a young Japanese friend in Tokyo who teaches English in a public elementary school. She has two classes of second and third graders, and she teaches alongside a male counterpart.

She often asks me questions by e-mail about the English manner of speaking while she is in class, and I do my best to respond quickly so she can pass along the words of an authentic speaker of American English to her students in real time.

She’s been studying English since she was a child, so her writing and reading skills are quite good, better than mine, actually, but in her classically low-keyed Japanese manner, she pretends to defer to me.

I have the impression that she doesn’t read my e-mails but tells the class what she knows already, using my name as an authority figure. Even today, in the 21st Century, Japanese people have a great deal of respect for authority. George Bush would make a great president of Japan.

My young Japanese friend also speaks excellent English with her easily understood accent. We’ve talked many times in person, on the phone, or on Skype. I think she has trouble with my mixed Okie-California-Northwest-East Coast accent.

Her facility in the English language often leads to tensions between her and the other English teachers, most of whom speak with a pronounced accent that would be incomprehensible if spoken in America.

The problem stems from the Japanese method of teaching pronunciation. The Japanese language has about 52 sounds and English words are pronounced according to these sounds. If a Japanese speaker of English can’t articulate a sound understandable to our ears, he or she will substitute a Japanese sound. The result is admittedly difficult for the average American ear to comprehend.

But in our characteristically American state of absolute arrogance, the thought never dawns on us that our facility in the Japanese language, or almost any language you care to name, including English, hovers around absolute zero. Everyone in the world is supposed to kiss our collective ass. If they don’t understand Hillbilly, just holler a little louder. Volume enhances understandability.

I’ve spoken and listened to many people from foreign countries, including Japan, China, Korea, Samoa, Tahiti, the Philippines, Spain, Germany, Mexico, Portugal, France, and a few others.

I’ve even listened to and conversed with people from the British Isles and, By George, those chaps are alright. They speak English almost as well we we do.

Maybe I should layout a spreadsheet like good American males are prone to do when they want to rate the quality of their liaisons, but I’ve decided to wing it when rating the understandability of the accents I’ve heard.

The people from the Philippines top my list. They are the easiest to understand, probably because the country was a possession of the U.S. for about 50 years and English was a required subject in the schools.

The Chinese also seem to speak English fairly easily. As I understand Chinese linguistics (as written in English), the Chinese dialects are comprised of sounds almost like musical tones, making it more adaptable to hearing and reproducing the various languages.

Samoans also speak English well. American Samoa has been a territory of the U.S. since 1898, and there’s a good deal of travel between Samoa and the West Coast.

I have more to report on, but an e-mail just arrived from my friend in Japan. She wants to know about “politically correct” words like police woman versus policeman and fireman versus fire women.

I’m certain she actually doesn’t need my help in this area. She knows more than I do about Americanish, the American government, and politics.

It’s a damned shame that Americans of her age can’t speak intelligently about our political system.

Technorati Tags: Japan,English Language

Don’t Fence Me In

Mt. Diablo High School in Concord wants to build a fence around its campus to keep hookey players in and outsiders out. The City Council is prepared to spend $43,000 on the project.

The story struck a spark in me because I was once a professional hookey player. My career began in the 10th grade when I attended Richmond Union High School.

In those days, nothing deterred me from leaving the school grounds when the mood struck, which was frequent.

I first fell into my evil habit by simply walking off of the school grounds at lunch. Apparently I was lucky the first three or four times. But one day a monitor stopped me at my favorite exit point and escorted me to a detention room.

The following day, I tried another convenient walk-away spot and figured I’d made it when a completely different monitor stepped from behind some shrubs about a block north of the school on 23rd Street.

After that, I cooled it and spent several days walking around the campus, alert for other potential exits as well as for patterns of behavior by the monitors.

A couple of things caught my attention. The monitors were actually teachers. As such, they were required to be in their classrooms when classes began again at 1 p.m. They’d usually leave their posts 10 to 15 minutes beforehand, providing an ample window of opportunity for me to escape.

However, a smart assed teacher figured it out and nailed me by feigning a return to his class but actually stepping behind a tree on my accustomed route and laying in wait.

Still, my developing brain continued its never ending search for a method of avoiding the monitors.

One day as I wandered along the perimeter of the school grounds, I stumbled across an old path that led behind the industrial arts building and through a wall of thick, overgrown bushes bordering the school’s South boundary.

Once through the hedges, I was completely out of sight of the school, which enabled me to walk a circuitous route to my favorite hookey hangout, a library in San Pablo where I’d disappear in a corner and read mystery novels.

For the balance of my time at RUHS, I escaped whenever I wanted, although the thrill of it soon waned and I looked for other exciting pursuits like working algebra word problems.

The Concord City Council and the Mt. Diablo High School are going to learn some interesting lessons after their fence is constructed.

There never was a monitor or a fence that could contain the restless minds of adolescent.

Off Topic. I used to have hair like Aaron Peskin’s. Everyone accused me of wearing a hairpiece. I also had a salt and pepper beard like his and black, bushy eyebrows. To top it off, I wore the same kind of glasses.

Technorati Tags: Playing Hookey,Concord,Richmond,Mt. Diablo High School

College, anyone?

The Contra Costa Times is running a series of in-depth examinations of community colleges. Today’s second part of a four-part series is headed Unready soon quit college.

The article opened with the following comment:

Community colleges nationwide labor under the weight of ill-prepared students. Some colleges estimate that nearly every student is unprepared in math, reading or writing — or all three.

The author, Matt Krupnick, supported his argument with a series of statistics:

• About 30 to 40 percent of the students in one pre-algebra class will fail to pass the course.
• Nationwide, nearly every student is unprepared in math, reading, or writing, and in many case, deficient in all three.
• In California alone, about 670,000 students were enrolled in basic English and math.
• Roughly three-fourths of students who take placement tests require remedial math.

For about twenty years, I taught in several 4-year and community colleges. Over that time, I accumulated enough anecdotal examples which, when added to the experiences of colleagues, solidly support Krupnick’s report.

To his list of the normal run of student shortcomintgs illustrated above–reading, writing, and math–we also include the academic buzzwords, “critical thinking.”

Given that students can hardly read or write, it follows naturally that they are totally unable to analyze material and communicate their opinions in a coherent, understandable form.

We also note that virtually none of our students possessed a basic knowledge about the world around them. Geography is a prime example. Out of a class of 35 students, one might be able to locate Iraq on a map. And more than you might imagine, couldn’t find the United States.

In my own fields, government, political science, and American studies, none of my students understood the basic structure of the United States government as taught in 8th grade civics classes. So many basic facts were missing from their minds that I found myself spending a half a semester or more teaching them these missing facts. For example, no one had ever read the First Ten Amendments to the Constitution, commonly known as the Bill of Rights, even though they were constantly claiming “constitutional rights” that did not exist.

When it came to history, almost no one had any sense of the timeline of important political events. It wasn’t unusual for a student to believe that the Civil War was fought in 1941 against Germany, or that the 50th state was admitted to the union in 1898.

One student illustrates a lack of historical sense combined with a dearth of information about current events. This very bright student insisted strongly that the state of Maryland still prohibited inter-racial marriages. Rather than argue, I contacted the office of a Maryland Assemblywoman and asked for a copy of the current Maryland law on the matter, which I received a few days later. I presented the law to the student, who silently read the brief text. The ban on inter-racial marriages in Maryland had been eliminated in 1968. I felt sorry for having embarrassed her, but she eventually became my best student and a friend.

While many argue that minor facts like these aren’t necessary to the process of critical thinking, they forget that facts are essential to support a reasoned argument. Otherwise, discussions become irrational shouting matches and name calling exercises, roughly equivalent to our modern political campaigns.

We also need to factor student attitudes into the discussion. A friend once jokingly remarked, “The major impediment to learning is testosterone.” He referred to the tendency of male students to spend their time in class avoiding any serious attempts to learn. They arrived late, left early, slept, and spent a great deal of time on their cells. In general, they displayed the classic posturing behavior of male peacocks attempting to attract a mate. To these kinds of individuals, college was not a learning environment but a place of encounter.

Although we could add many more elements to the discussion, let’s end with a couple of all too common phenomena regarding teachers rather than students. Too many teachers bring a show-biz approach to the classroom. They confuse teaching with acting and spend their class time emoting rather than engaging their students. One of my cohorts once observed that teaching is the next best thing to show business. He had a point.

And more instructors than we might be aware of want to be liked. In fact, they want to be liked so badly that they adopt the dress, hair styles, jargon, musical tastes, and even the manner of walking of young people. These teachers are usually highly popular, not because of their clumsy attempts to meld with the youth culture, attempts ridiculed by the students, but because their wanting to be liked leads them to assign high grades irrespective of effort and learning.

My own method of teaching was systematic and business-like, a thoroughly unpopular approach. I operated on a simple principle: complete the assigned work, get the grade. Fail to complete the assigned work, don’t get the grade. Students had a difficult time with this method, but eventually as word got around, they knew what to expect and completed the work to the best of their ability. In a few minds, I was, to coin an oft-despised phrase, fair and balanced, and to those with a sincere desire to learn, I was always eager to talk about politics. I loved discussing the subject one on one or in groups. That part of the job was worth all of the minor irritations.

At this point in time, solutions to a lack of preparation and poor learning attitudes seem almost beyond reach. How do we change a culture that has evolved over a long period of time? If placing blame is a topic on the table, who are we to blame? There’s enough to go around.

In the end, however, blame is counterproductive. The answers lie in sustained hard work. There are no magic bullets.

Technorati Tags: Community Colleges,Quality of Education

Readers’ Digress

If you’re the average person, you have those restless times when you wander around looking for something to do. You’ll browse here, you’ll browse there, sitting down, standing up, picking up a paper and tossing it back on your desk, looking for something…you know not what.

Me, I usually flick through my personal library. Over the years, I’ve bought a slew of books, only to stick them in a bookcase without reading them, ever. But occasionally I conduct a mental inventory just to make sure the books I’ve never read are still there. And they are, all of them, my treasure trove of idle material in mint condition.

There is Language in Thought and Action, written by S.I. Hayakawa, once president of SF State. And there’s Politics and Law, which is about four inches thick. Why would any sane human buy such a book? I have no idea other than to think that it sure looks impressive.

And on the bottom shelf, I find a book about the Three Stooges. My daughter gave it to me for an unnumbered birthday, and I’ll admit to leafing through it and looking at the pictures.

Actually, I despise reading anything longer than a couple of words, but in high school, we were forced to read. God! It was hellacious. Was I interested in the classics? Lord no. That is, until I stumbled across the classic author of books about dogs and the Gold Rush. Jack London’s White Fang was the first book I ever read from start to finish. The second was his Call of the Wild.

From there, I branched out to Zane Grey’s Code of the West and Riders of the Purple Sage. A few weeks ago, I had a renewed hankering for Zane. I tromped down to Borders and picked up the only one in stock, Under the Tonto Rim, which now reads hokey and trite, exciting no more.

Not too long after Zane, I discovered the Count of Monte Cristo. That one absorbed my life from the first to the last word and over again and again, until my copy of the Classic Comics version was dog eared. Classic Comics was my entrée into really serious stuff, the classics laid out in terms I could grasp, pictures in color. Classic Comics easily beat Cliff Notes for understandability. Today a copy of the Count of Monte Cristo, Classic Comics Number 3, is on e-Bay for around $800.

From Classic Comics, I graduated into the world of really serious reading. I devoured stuff like From Here to Eternity, Where Eagles Dare, and anything by Louis L’amour. Since then, I’ve read only two works of fiction. The first was True Believer by Nicholas Sparks and its sequel, At First Sight. The first is a love story, and I still don’t understand why I impulsively grabbed it from a rack at Safeway. The cover mesmerized me, I think. At First Sight is also a love story, but one with a difference. No plot revelations from me. Read it yourself.

I’m sure my reading habits are rather mundane and sporadic. And until recently, I had always imagined that most young people were like me in their choices of reading matter and habits. That is, until I browsed Facebook. That’s when I learned that the Facebook generation is into some deep and heady stuff.

Among the Top 5 preferred reads in the San Francisco Network, I found three oldies but goodies: Catcher in the Rye, 1984, and the Great Gatsby

Facebookers are overwhelmingly young, and their reading habits speak well of their intelligence and interests in things beyond immediate self-absorption. Hopefully, they’ll throw their weight behind Barack or Hillary in the November presidential election. We need a change in D.C., and younger voters hold the key to that change.

And, yes, I’ve read their three preferred novels. Think I’ll refresh my memory if I can locate them in my collection.

The East Bay is nice…

…and will suffice…

But that doesn’t mean I don’t like San Francisco or the North Bay or the Peninsula. All of these spots have their attractions and charms. What’s not to like?

For starters, the price of homes in SF is sky high. But then again, homes are expensive almost everywhere in California. For example, I would give a right arm to turn back the clock. I coulda been a millionaire (almost) if I’d held on to that spacious 3-br, 2 ba, encl gar, cent ht, cent AC, frplc in Tracy that we picked up for $15,000, $150 a month, a few years ago. Today, homes in that area are worth around $400,000.

And then there’s the sky-high murder rate in Oakland. How does society condone violence on such a scale? And in Richmond, too, the city now has more murders in a year than it did in all of the years we lived there.

Yes, there is much to dislike about all of the “Bays,” East, North, South, and Whatever. But good things exist, too. Here’s some positive stuff about the East Bay.

For starters, if you want to get away, you don’t have to cross one of those doggoned gridlocked bridges and get lost in the Maze or wind up somewhere in Modesto. If you’re driving to, say, Tahoe, you can avoid the main I’s out of the Bay Area by using a plethora of surface roads and state highways. Or you can head for the Oakland Airport and catch a flight with less hassle than you’ll encounter at SFO. My sister regularly drives from El Sobrante to Pleasanton on the back roads, a very enjoyable and pastoral trip.

And the views from the Oakland and Berkeley hills are spectacular, magnificent panoramas of the San Francisco skyline, day or night, as well as up-close and personal scenes of Marin County on clear days.

But the Berkeley and Oakland hills aren’t the only scenic viewing spots. From the hills around other communities, the sights are impressive, too. One little-known viewing spot is at the top of the hills around El Sobrante. You may have to search for it on hazy days, but San Francisco is clearly visible when the skies are clear. You can also find the Marin Hills and San Quentin even from some of the lower elevations. And while you’re at it, you can hike some of the trails that meander through a small park.

Despite over development, the East Bay still has it’s neighborhoods that remind us of less-harried lives. Orinda, for example, still has the old Orinda Theater sign clearly visible, and jumping South all the way to Alameda, the old town of Alameda is still suitably neighborhood-ish. Not to forget a drive through the old Alameda Naval Air Station where, if you’re lucky, you might catch the crew busily filming MythBusters. The show, by the way, also operates out of 1268 Missouri Street, San Francisco, and on Mare Island, Vallejo.

Back on the other side, the East Bay is also home to UC and the Marines. Why the Marine Corps decided to establish a recruiting station in Berkeley is beyond me. Do they expect to recruit imminent nuclear scientists, doctors of philosophy, and professors sick and tired of sassy students? I have a hunch they’d have more walk-in traffic in Richmond or Oakland. But, the reasoning of bureaucracies can be foggy sometimes.

But leaving the Marines aside for the moment, the campus is beautiful and worth a walk through. I’ve spent some time there not as a student but visiting a couple of friends. The campus still exudes an old-college atmosphere in spots. Hmmm. I wonder if the Marines would object if UC established an off-campus center in the Pentagon.

How do we continue to wander off-topic? Maybe it’s time to wrap this one up and have something to snack on at Denny’s on San Pablo Avenue, in El Cerrito. Denny’s isn’t the classiest cholesterol chain around, ranking right alongside the old Doggie Diners, but it’s our favorite breakfast spot, and it works well all day, too, as a quick coffee stop.

Should high school students voice their political opinions?

This is the gist of a discussion posted in Facebook’s US Politics application. Here is the topic heading as it appeared in Facebook: “Topic: attention high-schoolers: please stop voicing your political opinions”

One would think that the ensuing discussion would have set an adult tone if for no other reason than to serve as an example for high-schoolers to emulate.

But, no. True, some comments reflected logic and reason, but a substantial number descended rapidly to the squalling baby level. If any high-schoolers read the comments, they might conclude that remaining in the crib for thirty-years or so is a preferred future for aspiring pundits and talking heads.

Somehow, the discussion became a shout-down between the pro-anti Ayn Rand group, which led me to believe that a student had read a book or two by Ayn Rand in a class on something or other and voiced his/her opinion.

That’s how high-school and college students learn. They read books, ask questions, and voice their opinions. More power to them.

Unfortunately, they also learn from the behaviors of the adults around them. And when a bunch of squalling adults engages in a food fight right in front of them, they think it’s acceptable behavior.

In a letter to the editor of the Fog City Journal, Ann Garrison commented on the loss of the UC Extension Annex. She said that she once attended the Extension because she either wanted or needed to know something.

Her most telling point was a simple statement: “Knowledge is not just power; knowledge is pleasure.”

Adults quite often dampen or outright kill the pleasure of learning for high-school and college students.

Crime, Economy, Politics: The Axis

(Once upon a time, I was a prolific producer of crackpot ideas. The following essay is one that found its way into print. If you can work your way through the tedium, check the notes at the end for more background about the essay and why I decided to reanimate its dead tissue).

Reanimation

What would happen if crime in America ceased to exist? Certainly, the human tragedy and suffering we read about and see on television everyday would disappear.

But the complete cessation of crime or even a significant reduction in crime would have unintended consequences. Few people realize that crime is an economic benefit to millions of honest hard-working Americans. Consider:

The criminal justice system employs more than 1.4 million people, 270,000 more than the number of civilian employees of the Department of Defense and 67 percent the number of military personnel in uniform.

Nationally, the system spends $47 billion annually. This is about 20 percent of the U.S. defense budget. A single month’s payroll is $3 billion.

At the national level also, more than 4,000 private firms and corporations benefit from the governmental funding of more than 50,000 projects a year aimed at designing and producing sophisticated crime-fighting equipment and systems.

• Private firms spend about $50 million a year hiring security guards.
• Private police outnumber public police in many communities.
• More than 500 colleges and universities offer courses in criminal justice.
• Roughly 200 million crime-fighting oriented research and development dollars are available each year.
• 655,191 attorneys practice law in this country.

In fairness not all of the attorneys practice criminal law, but the 10 million people arrested annually in the United States provide a fertile source of fees for those who do.

But these statistics are literally only the tip of the iceberg.

• No one knows how much money carpenters make fixing doors damaged by burglars.
• How much profit doctors and hospitals realize from medical treatment provided to the victims of violent crime.
• How many dollars mortuaries make preparing the bodies of murder victims for burial.
• Or how much money is generated from increased automobile, home and personal belongings insurance, home security devices, and medical insurance sales resulting from the average 9.5 million households touched by crime each year in America.

Nor do we have a clear picture of how many businesses contract with federal, state and local criminal justice agencies for goods and services.

Equally obscure is the number of dollars realized by various elements of the American media by capitalizing on the existence of crime, writing about it, depicting it, reporting it, analyzing it.

But what is the significance of these statistics?

They point to an economic interdependence between the American political and economic spheres in which the incentives to maintain an optimal level of crime outweigh any costs to society.

The needs of a variety of powerful individuals—politicians, bureaucrats, and members of the private business community—to make their livelihoods take precedence over the public safety and result among other things in policy decisions that simply shift the taxpayer’s money from social programs to get-tough-on-the-criminal programs and back again depending on which political group is in power at the moment, with no real effect on rates of crime.

Moreover, legislators are in the enviable position of being able to define which human actions constitute criminal behavior, thus having the power to offset any real or perceived gain in the fight against crime simply by creating crimes-by-definition.

The rhetoric of crime fighting and the endless statistics on increasing crime rates presented to the American public have convinced most Americans that crime is as American as apple pie. This attitude in turn serves the powerful interests who profit from the existence of crime by eliminating or certainly reducing pressures for reform.

Noted criminal justice system analyst Charles M. Gray, speaking on the costs of crime, observed that the criminal justice system seeks not to eradicate crime but to minimize the sum total of the damage caused.”

What would happen if crime in America ceased to exist? The entire economy of this country would need to be overhauled from top to bottom and a substantial number of powerful individuals and institutions would cease to exist.

A lot of ordinary Americans would also be out of work.

Notes:

1. The preceding is a condensation of a 40-page research paper for a seminar in political science. It’s hell gutting a real artistic and creative product. Nothing but topic sentences and stats remain. Even if it is a crackpot product, it’s my crackpot creation.
   
2. In retrospect, lots of logical inconsistencies, lousy grammar, non sequiturs, etc. If I were writing it today, I’d smooth it out and explain that I am not talking about a conscious conspiracy to “fix” crime rates like some business engage in price fixing. It’s just a part of the system, the way things are done, like the air we breathe.
   
3. I’d also include info about “victimless crimes” like smoking pot, sex between consenting adults, and moralistic “Blue Laws.” Politicians could easily reduce crime-by-definition by legalizing these activities, as well as by erasing the records of those incarcerated for no more than the possession of pot. Reserve the prisons for serious crimes, murder, assault, child abuse.
   
4. My motivation for regurgitating this ancient relic came from an SF Willie post showing a map of SF with individual murders marked on it. The pattern of murders was clear: not many in upscale neighborhoods, one hell of a lot in the more economically challenged areas. The kicker came with a comment by Jerry Jarvis, who asked: “what is the common issue here. $$$$$”
   
5. This essay brought the hounds of hell down on me. I was called every dirty name in the book. Otherwise sane people became highly incensed because they took it personally and thought I was accusing them of failing in their duties as Americans.
   
6. Of course, the statistical data have been overtaken by time.
   
7. At least one pat on the back to me. The professor loved my 40-page paper and gave me an A. But he said on the last page: a little long winded, aren’t you?